Udemy arrives on the iPad

"Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and orginal manner possible." - Richard P. Feyman

Udemy is capitalizing on the growing market for video-based online education with a new interface and a new iPad app.

The company was founded in 2010 by Eren Bali, Oktay Caglar, and Gagan Biyani to create an open enviroment for instructors to build courses and students to learn. Learning at Udemy can happen anytime and anywhere one can connect to the web.

I've been experimenting with Udemy courses for over a year and am pleased with their newly updated course building tools. The platofrm is simple enough for beginners while offering everything you need to provide on demand instruction. Video and audio podcasts, presentation grpahics, PDFs, word processing documents, text files, and mashups are supported. Uploading videos is easy and relatively quick.

I also like the monthly royalty checks I receive!

Students will find a wide assortment of over 5,000 reasonably priced courses. Many courses free. Over 350,000 students have enrolled in at least one course with the past two years. And they are learning from leading universities (i.e., Stanford, MIT, Yale, Northwestern) and industry experts (i.e., O'Reilly, Pearson, Khan Academy, Eric Ries, Sadie Nardini, and yours truly).

Once you enroll in a Udemy course you have permanent access to it and will be notified of any updates. You can always go back and review material and there is no deadline. You learn at your own convenience and at your own speed!

iPad users can download the Udemy app at the Apple Apps Store. It's free. You'll find is classified under education. The current version is 0.94 and it was last updated on December 23, 2012. It only needs 33.2 MB of memory space and requires iOS version 5.0 or later. So far there is no iPhone app available but I anticipate one will be announced soon.

I'm offering my iWork Numbers course free to the first twenty-five of my readers who enroll as an incentive to give this product a try. Just type in the coupon code "iPhone Life" and you are in!

Or, if you prefer, you can enroll in my Beginning Perl course this month for only $10. That's a 67% discount! Just use the 'iPhone Life" coupon code. Be quick! There is a limit of 20 enrolments on this offer.

If you like these courses I hope you'll check out one of my other courses on iWork Keynote, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Perl Regex (Regular Exressions), and more. There are plenty of other instructors too!

But it's okay if computer science and software aren't your faves, There are plenty of topics covered on Udemy. Just give it and the iPad app a try.